“Origin” and the Demise of the Dan Brown Formula

Apparently Dan Brown is the Elizabeth Gilbert of grocery-store thrillers. Too easy, vapid and pandering. Or worse. Based on the overwhelmingly condescending and high-brow dismissiveness his books might as well be 50 Shades of Simple Mysteries. Twilight for adults who romanticize European art and architecture, historical mystery and political-ish intrigue. Book lovers and literary snobs seem to relegate him somewhere between Nora Roberts and John Grisham.

While he is much maligned for his formulaic plots, it turns out that I like that formula. Or at least I did. Until I read Origin.

On a scale of Meh to Why Isn’t This Required Reading, Origin is definitely a Where’s The Gas Leak. It’s like someone kidnapped Dan Brown and only had 24 hours to write a Dan Brown-esque novel with his well-worn formula or the world population will irreversibly find themselves … without a new Dan Brown novel. It is painfully slow while trying to be fast-paced. It is deliberately withholding. It plods along so slowly I could believe in the possibility of a rip in time, that I could step through a watery shadowy portal and materialize, all my particles intact, in a Costco in San Clemente last year and implore my Uncle Frank not to buy this book, not hardcover, not to loan it to my mom. But the truth is that I would’ve found my way to it no matter what. Because I loved everything that came before it, tropes and all.

In Origin, our smarter-than-you protagonist is called upon once again in a race against time to save humanity from an impending global crisis. The clock is ticking and the consequences if he fails have pandemic implications.

Brown’s man-crush manifestation is joined yet again by a brilliant but unwittingly implicated European brunette who is prettier and brainier than any American woman you’ve ever solved crimes with. And together they will take on another ambiguously bad bad guy (who righteously believes he’s the good guy) with a bizarre and tragic, though barely developed, back story.

Robert Langdon is clearly the one who got away. The six-foot dreamboat Brown once fell in love with or always longed to be. But he too is a poorly developed character. His character traits are tacked on rather than fleshed out in a way that lets us get to know him. He is a professor-shaped human with no organic personality. For five books we’ve watched Brown stack the same Jenga blocks to make the man of his dreams: The Harvard Professor block is on the bottom as it is strong enough to support the lesser weight of the rest — six feet tall, eidetic memory, suffers from claustrophobia, and is a contented bachelor. That he wears a Mickey Mouse watch to “remind himself not to take life too seriously” is more of a subtraction than an addition of character in Brown’s heavy-handed attempt to make Langdon seem human, let alone believable. Like a realtor who stages a home before the open house, Brown slaps together some details to fan out on the end table, a generic landscape painting on an entryway wall, some empty candleholders on the mantel, a Harris tweed draped over the back of a chair and some Ferragamo flats kicked off by the bed. But everybody knows nobody lives here. And no one reading this book will be able to see themselves in this story, feel themselves living this experience through our tall, dark and handsome hero. This is a classic case of the lights are on but no one’s home.

Everything this book lacks, book critic Ron Charles makes up for in this exasperated but hilarious Washington Post review. Because Origin is such a colossal disappointment I will leave you with some literary crumbs, bullet points from his outstanding review.

• Dan Brown is back with another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff.
• For 100 pages, Brown talks like the pilot on a grounded airplane, assuring us that we’ll take off any minute now.
• Brown may not have discovered a secret that threatens humanity’s faith, but he has successfully located every cliche in the world.
• Darwinians, fundamentalists, atheists and believers: Pray that this cup pass from you.